Bing’s approach to mobile-friendly search slightly different from Google’s

At 1st glance, it looks like Microsoft’s Bing search engine has decided to whole-heartedly follow Google in the “mobile-friendly” search results plans. But a closer look reveals a slight difference.

Bing had started recently tagging search results as “Mobile-friendly”. This enabled users to skim through the search results to know which ones would quickly answer their information needs.

According to a post on the Bing blog, “….we received great feedback from this change in user experience showing that users strongly prefer pages marked with the mobile-friendly tag. Based on data from user’s interaction with Bing, we have seen that mobile users are able to satisfy their information needs much faster on searches that return more mobile-friendly results. With that in mind, we will be rolling out mobile friendliness as a signal in ranking.”

But Bing’s approach to mobile friendliness as a ranking signal is aimed to strike a fine balance between the need to improve the ranking for mobile-friendly pages & the continued focus on delivering the most relevant results for a given query. Says the blog post, “This means that for mobile searches on Bing, you can always expect to see the most relevant results for a search query ranked higher, even if some of them are not mobile-friendly, said the post, adding, “…while the changes will improve ranking for mobile-friendly pages, Web pages that are highly relevant to the given query that are not yet mobile-friendly will not get penalized. This is a fine balance and getting it right took a few iterations, but we believe we are now close.” So, there it is – the essential difference between the Google & Microsoft plans. That, then, in a nutshell, is the difference between the “mobile friendly” search plans of Google & Microsoft.

Bing expects to roll out mobile friendliness ranking changes in the coming months. It further revealed that it had also been working on a tool that would allow Webmasters to analyze Web pages using the “mobile friendliness classifier” & help them understand the results. This tool would also become available in a few weeks & help Webmasters find & fix areas of their site that suffer from mobile friendliness issues. “Understanding the factors that influence mobile friendliness will help serve our growing mobile user base much better,” said the post.

Mobile search continues to surge ahead and grow as a percentage of overall internet search queries. In November 2014, we shared our plans to make significant investments towards understanding the mobile friendliness of web pages. Since then, we have been investigating various approaches that leverage mobile friendliness to deliver the best possible mobile search experience on Bing….